I have been testing for a few weeks Mint, originally started on 21.2 on an old 2012 MacBook Air… the OS was flying! As I was looking at this now 10 years old machine, now back to usable speed again I was pleasantly surprised. On my desktop was still running Fedora that is just a bit more shiny and has the latest “stable” packages.
I had a negative bias on Mint as I disliked the idea of a newbie’s distro and was two steps away from Debian so for some time I left it aside.
A couple of weeks after that I decided to dust off an old 2013 iMac for my wife to be using as desktop machine and, she being a windows gal, I thought a safe bet would have been Mint that doesn’t feel alien for those coming from that OS.
Again, mind blown by the performance.
I decide to play it risky and so I reimagine it with LMDE: everything works out of the box. I just install the NVIDIA driver from Synaptics and then the computer is set.
This was the drop that made me go on the rabbit hole. I went on a spree to install LDME on an old gaming laptop that was hidden in the dust for now 5 years and then to a few other machines. (Yeah I have a bit of spare hardware lying around)
The last few days I have been thinking to put mint on the main desktop but was afraid of letting GNOME go… and so I decided to test GNOME on one of those LDME machines…
Omg…. Mind blown again. Essentially we can now have Debian with all the delicious little Mint tools. This kinda feels like how Debian is supposed to be! But it is Mint! Even GNOME contains all the little things that, on Fedora for example, I used to have to install manually but now they were there already! Like Gnome Tweaks, or extensions like the Places indicator or other small ones…
I am not sure I am managing to convey how this feels… I have always wanted to have Debian but Debian has made it, one way or another, impossible for me to stay. Mint is making it possible today. What a blessing of a distro.
Rant over.
Side note: I think I have fallen in love with Cinnamon, oups!
Forked distros be like that, yes) however idea of forked distros is to have preset defaults that cater to certain groups of people, basically to have less hassle you choose fork to your liking and just do “flash and go” without much customizing
lol yes
I was using LMDE for a while. Sadly, my laptop is in dire need of proprietary nvidia driver…
Can’t you pick it up from Synaptic?
I tried, and it worked okay, but Ubuntu’s driver-manager works so much better.
Yeah that is objectively sweet
The main issue with Debian, i feel, is if you have modern hardware, the distro at the end of its life cycle will be quite outdated, with very old packages (namely at both the driver level, and also the desktop environment). However, I am yet to test the testing branch which may solve for this sort of use case, while still being decently stable.
Is the problem of outdated packages still a thing now that you can get them all via Flatpacks?
Concerning the kernel, again, can you always benefit from the latest one? Personally I am starting to appreciate not having to constantly update the OS while at the same time enjoying the latest software. Concerning apt packages, those in the Debian repo will just work like clockwork
It’s really only an issue with newer hardware and even then, there are usually backports available.
Flatpak isn’t going to have every library, cli tool, or even every GUI tool. I think in the end out of date just isn’t worth it.
Install the backport kernel. Use flatpak for gaming (latest mesa) and the applications you want the latest version. Perfect combination between stable and latest updates.
Actually in my very very very very specific case, that is impossible. (Although for most users with modern hardware, I’d still want something a bit more dynamic, even if just from a DE standpoint)
It is impossible for me because I am on a Mac, and since the drivers are still being written :P. The kernel is custom as well as the mesa implementation, so for now, not really an option
woops, jep not an option
And currently flatpaks really are an annoyance, because since I am on arm, they are one of the largest collections of applications, which would be great, if they didn’t ship their own outdated mesa, which means I don’t have hardware acceleration in a lot of cases
